Baseball is forever cast as a game about fathers and sons, and so it was that Jim Adenhart Jr. sat in Jim Adenhart Sr.’s Maryland home Thursday night to watch their faraway team scare the New York Yankees straight.

Among the legions of Angels’ fans transfixed by Game 5 of the American League Championship Series, nobody needed a Game 6 more than the two grown men acting like little boys when certain elimination in the top of the seventh turned into a Bronx-bound charge in the bottom of the seventh.

“We were hooting and hollering the whole night,” Jim Sr. said.

Above all else, father and son desperately wanted to see Jered Weaver do the job in relief.

Ever since that April night, when an allegedly drunk driver ran a red light and shattered their everything, killing Nick Adenhart and two of Nick’s friends, Weaver has been the family’s bridge back to a forbidden place.

The Adenharts can’t get over how much Weaver’s long, lanky physicality reminds them of the 22-year-old right-hander who had thrown six scoreless innings at Oakland hours before a tragic set of circumstances conspired to take his life. Nick didn’t have a place to stay in Anaheim.

“So my grandson was supposed to move in with Weaver the day after he was killed,” Jim Sr. said.

The 73-year-old family patriarch is about as tough as they come. Jim Sr. spent 20 years on the Washington police force, and he’s spent much of the past 15 fighting non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He’ll start another round of chemo Monday, and he’d much prefer to do it with the Angels booked for a Game 1 matchup with the Philadelphia Phillies.

Truth is, October has been hell on the Adenharts. This is the time of year Nick always returned from his completed minor-league rounds and visited with his grandparents, Connie and the man he called Pap.

Nick would always end up in the back yard playing Wiffle Ball with the younger kids. At holiday time, Jim Sr. would be sure to make Nick two of his favorite snacks potato candy and pumpkin bread.

“He was a big kid at heart,” Jim Sr. said through the tears. “At Christmastime he’d roll around the floor with our youngest grandchild and help her open her presents.

“We had a special relationship. He’d call my son and me after every game and go over every inning, every pitch. I remember that every time he left our house, even after he’d grown up, he hugged me like he was still a boy.”

Jim Jr. flew out to Anaheim to see his son’s first 2009 start, set for April 8. Back in Hagerstown, Md., Jim Sr. watched the game on TV.

“When Nick turned around the first time and you could see `Adenhart’ on his back,” Jim Sr. said, “what a feeling of pride I felt.”

Early the next morning, Jim Sr.’s daughters arrived at his home with news that Nick had been badly injured in an accident. Soon Jim Jr. called from the hospital to report that his son had perished.

Pap and Connie retreated to the sanctuary of their church. When they arrived, Jim Sr. placed three photos of his grandson on the altar – one showing Nick as a baby, one showing Nick as a high school graduate, and one showing Nick as an Angel.

“That was Nick’s entire life right there,” Jim Sr. said.

The grandparents spent a couple of hours praying with two priests. After Nick was buried, Jim Sr. couldn’t watch any baseball for three weeks.

But the Angels brought the Adenharts back. They graced their center-field wall with Nick’s image, maintained his locker at home and on the road, hung his jersey in their dugout, and wore a patch with his number 34. So when the Angels doused Adenhart’s jersey with champagne and beer under the cover of traditional baseball revelry, reminding some offended viewers of the role of alcohol in Nick’s death, the family was actually touched by the gesture.

“And when they all went out to feel Nick’s picture on the wall,” Jim Sr. said, “it was like Nick was in center field waiting for them. It was heartwarming, because it was like Nick was standing out there alive.”

The Adenharts are law-enforcement people – Jim Sr. worked as an investigator in the Hagerstown public defender’s office after his time as a D.C. cop, and Jim Jr. spent 17 years with the Secret Service before becoming a deputy sheriff in a detention center.

But even after years of working DWI stops, Jim Sr. doesn’t spend his days wishing ill will on the accused driver in Nick’s death, Andrew Thomas Gallo.

“Nick’s gone and there’s nothing we can do about it,” Jim Sr. said. “This boy has to live the rest of his life with this, and if he has any conscience at all, it wouldn’t be something I’d want to live with.”

Before Games 3, 4 and 5, thousands of fans stopped at the Adenhart memorial just outside the Angel Stadium gates. The memorial is graced by pictures of Nick, American flags, teddy bears in Angel jerseys and all sorts of balls and gloves and printed hopes of everlasting peace.

“Nick could’ve been pitching against the Yankees in this series,” Jim Sr. said, “but it’s a spiritual feeling to see how his memory has inspired his team. Now that we got this back to New York, we want to go all the way.”